Tag Archives: change

There are moments in a life when we realize that things have changed. The tides of rage and love have risen or fallen, taking with them the memories of our times with the people we cherish and hate, sometimes burying them deep into the dark, sometimes bringing them to the light of day. Like the winds of a hurricane we feed into the anger with our jealousy, doubt, fear. We wonder why when everything around us is crashing to the ground. And then it hits us.

Realization.

Then, at that moment, we know the truth. We understand why the ocean’s tide moves. We have gained insight, and it becomes apparent: the situation sucks. We withdraw, we lash out, we run away, we shut up, we don’t know what to do, we know exactly what we want to say but say nothing at all. For no reason, but with plenty of reason. The emotion sickness has consumed us, and we are very sick.

Action.

But how do we get out of the negativity? How do we change the situation? Sometimes there isn’t a good answer. I think the best way to approach this is a desire to change the situation. Of course, we can’t change other people, but, we can impress on them a different point of view of ourselves. So in essence, we can change the world around us, through hard work, determination, and commitment and the willingness to change ourselves. I believe it was Ghandi that said “we must be the change we wish to see in the world.” Obviously, his view was for a much larger portion of the world, but I believe this is perfect for the smaller portions of the world that we all arrive in daily.

Be the change.

Dropping a negative view can be one of the most difficult things to do. It’s a habit. A very negative habit. The habit of constantly being negative due to fears, or at least due to the effects of deeply rooted and possibly hidden fear, just seems to draw on and empty our energies, both physical and emotional. It also empties the energies of those we care about and love which sends relationships into spirals, deepens fears, creates drama….etc, etc, etc. But it’s simply a habit. It was made, it can be broken!

The wind was was noisy as it rushed past the empty branches of the trees outside. It got me thinking about how we tremble and shake at the winds of this life. Changes are usually centric to the fears that make us worry and, as we fear, we develop a large group of emotions based around those fears. My mom always says, “fear stands for false evidence appearing real”.
So, why be afraid if fears are are really false ideas and emotions?
Why indeed…

I believe fear is an essential nutrient to the body of emotional and psychological life, not just to survive but to thrive. Fear is, after all, scary! The situations surrounded by fear are usually intense, at the least. However, as I said, change is centric to fear. No one has feared something that has not changed.

And so begins a debate. Let me first argue my point.

Of course, the dark does not change, it has been here before the world began. God made the world from [out of the] darkness, for instance. Remember, my focus is on change and the reasoning of fear. The darkness was given a counterpart, the sun, to provide light from the darkness. There’s the change. Does that however make the dark less frightening to those who have a fear of it? Yes. The light merely changes the current state of the level of darkness that we see with our eyes; turn off the light and the light is still there. Everyday the darkness is reinvented to us when we turn off the light switch and we remember that we have a fear of it. Oh yeah, we fear things we don’t understand, too. Fundamentally, because there is the possibility of changes that we don’t know how to respond. In other words, if you walked into a room and the lights suddenly shut off would you not experience a level of fear? At the very least, concern? “Did the power go out?” “Did someone bump a switch?” “Is there danger present?” Suddenly, the change triggers an emotional level of reactions and so beings the ride.

Remember, these are the ideas of uneducated man who is only trying hard to understand them himself.

So, if fear is centric to change, how do we deal with change? Would learning to coupe with change erase fear? Minimize it?
I’d like to hear your thoughts, uneducated or otherwise.

~B

P.S. After reading this today I realized I made some mistakes and have corrected them. Also, I do apologize for my overuse of the conjunction “but”.